Salem’s Lot
By Stephen King
Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.
They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroën sedan, mainly keeping to secondary roads, travelling in fits and starts. They stopped in three places along the way before reaching their final destination: first in Rhode Island, where the tall man with the black hair worked in a textile mill; then in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked for three months on a tractor assembly line; and finally in a small California town near the Mexican border, where he pumped gas and worked at repairing small foreign cars with an amount of success that was, to him, surprising and gratifying.
Wherever they stopped, he got a Maine newspaper called the Portland Press-Herald and watched it for items concerning a small southern Maine town named Jerusalem’s Lot and the surrounding area. There were such items from time to time. He wrote an outline of a novel in motel rooms before they hit Central Falls, Rhode Island, and mailed it to his agent. He had been a mildly successful novelist a million years before when the darkness had not come over his life. The agent took the outline to his last publisher, who expressed polite interest but no inclination to part with any advance money.
“Please” and “thank you,” he told the boy as he tore the agent’s letter up, but they were still accessible. He said it without too much bitterness and set about the book anyway.
The boy did not speak much. His face retained a perpetual pinched look, and his eyes were dark—as if they constantly scanned some bleak inner horizon. In the diners and gas stations where they stopped along the way, he was polite and nothing more. He didn’t want the tall man out of sight, and the boy seemed nervous even when the man left him to use the bathroom. He refused to talk about the town of Jerusalem’s Lot. However, the tall man tried to raise the topic occasionally and would not look at the Portland newspapers, which the man sometimes deliberately left around.
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Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author. Called the “King of Horror,” he has also explored other genres, including suspense, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.
Biography.
He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections. His debut, Carrie (1974), established him in horror. Different Seasons (1982), a collection of four novellas, was his first significant departure from the genre. Among the films adapted from King’s fiction are Carrie, Christine, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Stand by Me, Misery, Dolores Claiborne, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and It. He has published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and has co-written works with other authors, notably his friend Peter Straub and sons Joe Hill and Owen King. He has also written nonfiction, notably On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Several of King’s works have won the Bram Stoker and August Derleth Awards. He has also won awards for his overall contributions to literature, including the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the 2014 National Medal of Arts. Joyce Carol Oates called King “a brilliantly rooted, psychologically ‘realistic’ writer, for whom the American scene has been a continuous source of inspiration, and American popular culture a vast cornucopia of possibilities.”
Early life and education
King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a travelling vacuum salesman after returning from World War II, was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult. King’s mother was Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury). His parents were married in Scarborough, Maine, on July 23, 1939. They lived with Donald’s family in Chicago before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. King’s parents returned to Maine after World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. He is of Scots-Irish descent.
When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David alone, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson; West De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Malden, Massachusetts; and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was 11, his family moved to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. After that, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen King
